Kate and Emily had a great time working on figuring out the latitude of their respective mystery classes yesterday. We used a trial and error approach, looking up the photoperiods of cities at their classes' longitude to compare to the photoperiod of their mystery classes. We've got pretty solid guesses as to the cities, now. Fun!
So my question for you ladies is: Do you want to start sharing city & country guesses here, in the comments? Or will that spoil the guessing fun for anyone? I suppose if we're doing it in the comments, people who want to compare guesses can click on comments, and people who don't can avoid them. What do you think?
Tips for first-timers: we've now reached what I think is the most fun part of the project. Your photoperiod graphs will help you figure out the latitude of your Mystery Class. As I said, a lot of trial and error goes into the guesswork at this part of the stage.
For example, we knew from the comments that Class #4 is at about the same latitude as the folks in Denver. Emily Sanchez's class, #8, is on a line slightly below Class #4's on the graph. I asked the girls questions to help them figure out the significance of the lines on the graph.
Q. Is Class #8 in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere?
A. Its photoperiod increases as the equinox approaches, so it must be in the northern hemisphere.
Q. Class #8's line is below Class #4's line on the graph—does that mean it is north or south of Class #4?
A. North, because the farther from the middle of the graph (the 12-hour line) it is, the farther the class is from the equator.
And so forth.
Next, we looked up Denver's latitude (because we remembered that the Denver folks said they are at about the same latitude as their Mystery Class). There are lots of places to find city latitudes on the internet, including the photoperiod calculators in the sidebar. (This site is particularly good.) Another easy way is simply to Google the words "Denver latitude." (But don't use the quotation marks.)
Denver's latitude is about 39 degrees N. Since we already knew the longitude for Class #8, we looked at cities on that longitude, a little north of 39 degrees latitude. Then we started Googling for the latitude of those cities.
Now came the trial and error part. We used the photoperiod calculator to find the photoperiod for some of those cities, on the same dates as the dates on our graph. Gradually we narrowed down the area until we had a good, solid guess about Class #8's latitude. More Google fun, some map inspection, and we think we found the place! This week's cultural clue matches our guess. We can't wait for next week's clue!
After that, we did the same thing for Class #10. Finding a starting point was easy, because our graph tells us Class 10 must be in the southern hemisphere, and at the right longitude, there are only two countries to choose from. The culture clue told us which one to try first!
We had a great afternoon doing our guesswork. Kate and I are going to make guesses about some of the other cities this morning. Fun fun!
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